In Syria we drink cola. . .

The bus from Damascus to Aleppo takes five hours, so I arrived in town without having eaten lunch and with a mean case of leg cramps from too much time in a too-small seat. To solve both those problems, I roamed over the "new" city neighborhood of my hotel before settling on one of the many hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Once inside, I ordered one of the two dishes they had on offer. It turned out to be a rather soupy conconction with foul (fava beans), garbanzo beans, tahini and red pepper which I attempted, somewhat unsucessfully, to eat with the provided pita bread.


The shop assistants took a special interest in me, asking the generic "where are you from?" before transitioning into stranger questions such as: "And what time is it in California?" The younger shop assistant was very impressed with my answer and repeated it to several of the customers, all of whom nodded sagely before returning their attention to their food.

When I got my drink - a non-Coke version of cola (Ugarit cola is named for an ancient Syrian port city. It tastes better than Pepsi - not difficult considering the fact that Pepsi is on par with monkey pee - but is not as good as that blessed elixer of dreams, Coca Cola), the assistant offered me one of the finest Englisht sentences he could muster, and one which amused me for days: "In Syria we drink cola," he declared. "In America: Vodka!"



Really? Vodka? Are you sure you are not confusing your stereotypes of Americans with those for Russians/Poles?

On another ocassion (this time in Damascus, but the anecdotes are related), the barber who was giving my hair a trim had Oprah playing on his shop TV. The episode was one in which Oprah visited the Yearning for Zion Ranch in. . . wherever the Yearning for Zion Ranch is. As the host spoke to a group of women with consistently bizarre hair-dos and occassionally glazed expressions, the barber said to me: "This is America," to which I replied that, to the contrary, these were crazy people.

He was not convinced.



What, exactly, is America's reputation in Syria, then? Are we a bunch of vodka swilling cultists? I was under the impresisons that cults like YFZ would be against vodka drinking, but Oprah never mentioned it in the few minutes I watched of her program. The only other reaction I got to my being American (aside from the requisite, and yet reassuring, "welcome") was expressions of support for Obama, for whose achievements I willingly took credit.

Fortified by foul, I spent the next day exploring Aleppo. The citadel was particularly impressive, even on the rainy morning during which I visited it. It hangs over the old city and souk like a story-book castle, complete with (empty) moat. Visitors can reach it only by climbing a long stairwell. Once I had ascended the stairs and navigated the dark hallways to reach the roof, the views were spectacular despite the clouds.





On my second day in Aleppo, I had a private tour of various ruins outside of the city - as I have mentioned, it is impossible to visit a new place without being compelled to explore its ruins. This trip was arranged by the Kurdish valet at the hotel next door to mine, and my driver was also Kurdish. He taught me a few essential words in his native language, such as those meaning sheep and dog, but I unfortunately forgot them moments later and will be unable to carry on intelligent conversations with any Kurdish shepherds I may one day encounter.



First we visited the remains of some old cities whose dates I could not extract from my driver's heavily accented Arabic. We saw a church in Mushabbak, and in Qatura he showed me Greco-Roman carvings in a wall. I was more impressed with the roofless, stone houses like that in the image above. To its side was a vast series of caves into one of which we climbed. It is there that people made olive oil with a giant stone apparatus of which some pieces remain.



The most famous site I visited - famous to those who know about this kind of thing, anyway - was San Simeon, or Qal'at Samaan.
This is a 5th century basillica built to celebrate Simeon and his infamous piety. I got the story of his life from the guide of a group of Brits: After the young Simeon joined a monastary, he found the life of a monk unsatisfactorially materialistic and retreated to live alone atop a hill near his village. This action led to his reputation as a holy man and he was disturbed by visitors seeking blessings, so he took the logical next step and built himself a three-foot pillar. He lived up there, hovering above the ground, but when people were still able to reach him he built an even taller one, and repeated this process until he was far enough away from the earth that he was no longer disturbed.



That may be the remains of one of his pillars, but I can't be sure.



To finish off the tour, my driver and I traveled further north. We saw a few military fortifications which my driver explained away because of the proximity of the Turkish border, and we crossed into what he informed me was a primarily Kurdish area. There, I visited Ain Dara, a hill-top ruin of a Hittite temple built around 1000 BC.

It was there that I met my number one fans and got the biggest reaction to my American-ness of the trip. A group of about 40 Kurdish school children arrived at the site at the same time as I did, and I walked up the hill among them. I was immediately the subject of curious questioning, and once it was established that I spoke a little Arabic and that I was, indeed, a foriegner, I became quite the celebrity. Every answer I gave was repeated at top volume among the rest of the crowd, as if I were imparting Very Important Information:

"Her name is Ruth! She is American!"
"American!"
"An American! Named Roooooooooooooth!"



The children also plucked countless wild flowers to and presented them to me. When I turned around and gave those same flowers to other kids, I received new ones so that I am sure there are now nude spots on that hillside for which I am to blame. The only boy wearing sunglasses gave me about five flowers by himself - maybe he felt solidarity with me because of our eyewear. Some kids were eating chips and tried to make me share with them, but once they saw that I had a camera the excitement really grew. The kids crowded around insisting that I take their pictures and giggling with delight at the result, even though most of them didn't smile for the photo.

I requested to be in a photo myself, at which point the camera was handed off to one of their teachers and kids came pealing in from the four corners of the site to crowd around me: The next day, I took the long bus trip back to Damascus and was seated next to an elderly lady whose passport I spotted with great interest: It read "The Republic of Iraq." After establishing that I speak only a little Arabic this woman asked whether I knew Armenian, which led to my super-sleuth conclusion that she, herself, has that nationality.The lady and I became fast friends when she informed me that the man waving goodbye was her son, to whom she gave birth at age 16. He looked around 45, which makes my seatmate not as ancient as she appeared, but I suppose that the life of an Armenian mother raising seven children in Iraq during the 1960s and '70s could not have been particularly easy. The woman made me share her apples and cookies with her, then showed me pictures of her mother and displayed a crucifix she had in the bowels of her bag. I was too shy to take her photo, but I did help her turn off the fan which blew on her face and made her cold - she was too short to reach it - and smiled as much as I could.

The people of Syria, then, are much like the country's historical (and modern) cities, if I can extend the metaphor this far. They have all different backgrounds and languages and religions but are piled on top of each other until they create a cohesive, ocassionally squirming, but generally charming, whole.

And they like to feed Americans.